Gretchen Quarterman asked the first question at Saxby Chambliss' Farm Bill Forum in Tifton:
Bring our troops home.
That way we'd have more money for everything else.
Here's the video:
Bring our troops home —Gretchen Quarterman
Farm Bill Forum, Senator Saxby Chambliss,
Gary Black, Charles Hall, Robert Redding, John Maguire,
Tifton, Tift County, Georgia, 16 March 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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Why is Georgia Power still peddling misinformation about solar power instead of moving ahead with it? What’s happening in Germany could be a clue.
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The first graph illustrates what a typical day on the electricity market in Germany looked like in March four years ago; the second illustrates what is happening now, with 25GW of solar PV installed across the country. Essentially, it means that solar PV is not just licking the cream off the profits of the fossil fuel generators — as happens in Australia with a more modest rollout of PV — it is in fact eating their entire cake.So solar is taking the profits out of coal and natural gas. So sad!
Deutsche Bank solar analyst Vishal Shah noted in a report last month that EPEX data was showing solar PV was cutting peak electricity prices by up to 40%, a situation that utilities in Germany and elsewhere in Europe were finding intolerable. “With Germany adopting a drastic cut, we expect major utilities in other European countries to push for similar cuts as well,” Shah noted.You know, if the utilities got out in front and generated energy from solar and wind themselves, they wouldn’t be having this problem.Analysts elsewhere said one quarter of Germany’s gas-fired capacity may be closed, because of the impact of surging solar and wind capacity. Enel, the biggest utility in Italy, which had the most solar PV installed in 2011, highlighted its exposure to reduced peaking prices when it said that a €5/MWh fall in average wholesale prices would translate into a one-third slump in earnings from the generation division.
Here in Georgia, even Georgia Power could get going and do that, instead of fighting this:
Continue reading 
Andrea Schruijer, Executive Director of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA), made a presentation to the Lowndes County Commission at their Work Session 26 March 2012. VLCIA Board member G. Norman Bennett was also present. Congratulations to VLCIA on proactively getting the word out about what they are doing!
Here's a playlist:
Industrial Authority presentation
Work Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 26 March 2012.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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See separate items on the appointment of Sheila Cook to the Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities, and Addictive Diseases Region Four Planning Board and “We expect you to run a clean, quiet establishment” —Ashley Paulk.
Other notable parts of this meeting were when
staff
said conservation status was a small detail and
and
Commissioners
proceeded to get rid of it in a rezoning.
At the end of the meeting,
County Manager Joe Pritchard
didn’t listen to Commissioner Powell’s request
and proceede to recount details of
road paving property signatures
until Chairman Paulk nudged him that the question was about
tornadoes, after which Pritchard
gave a recap of
Ashley Tye’s tornado report of the previous morning.
Here’s
the agenda.
Here’s
a playlist:
Videos
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission, (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 March 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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A month ago (28 February 2012), Chairman Ashley Paulk
chastised the VDT for how it reported on recent changes to the alcohol
ordinance.
This month he singled out an applicant for an alcohol license and said:
We expect you to run a clean, quiet establishment. If not, we expect the Sheriff to enforce the law.Sheriff Chris Prine nodded.
Here’s the video:
“We expect you to run a clean, quiet establishment” —Ashley Paulk @ 2012-03-13
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission, (LCC), Lowndes County Commission,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 March 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
What’s this about, and what’s the connection with the meeting of a month ago? The Chairman was referring to Continue reading
Paul Krugman wrote yesterday for the NYTimes, Lobbyists, Guns and Money,
ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatizationSame as private prisons. The only real benefit goes to private prison company executives and shareholders.— that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.
What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.
And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals. Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.
Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.And today we have an organized threat to justice everywhere. That threat is called ALEC.
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Paul Wolff told us how he came to invest in solar energy:
I did the math on it ahead of time. I had a bunch of mutual funds that hadn’t done anything in a long time. I figured out given the state and federal tax credits what the payback would be, and it came out to be about eight years. So I just divided that out, and by selling mutual funds and investing that money in solar panels on my roof it’s an eleven percent return. And in this economic climate I have nothing else yielding anywhere near that. So that’s a selling point.
Here’s the video:
11% return on solar panel investment —Paul Wolff
Tybee Island, Chatham County, Georgia, 17 February 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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Debate at Valdosta State University between Democrats and Republicans, 20 March 2012,
organized by
Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity, International Pre-Law Chapter.
Moderator: Dr. Jim Peterson
Democrats: President Kelli Cody and former President Alex Thomas
Republicans: Chairman Ron Bearwall, Political Director George Lee, and Secretary Preston Porter.
Somebody please correct any misspelling of names.
Here’s a playlist:
Videos of VSU Debate 2012-03-20 between VSU Democrats and VSU Republicans,
Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 20 March 2012.
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
Here are the debate questions:
A few more videos will follow. -jsq
Here are videos of the February 2012 Industrial Authority meeting.
Apologies for the poor sound.
The room turned out to have very echoey acoustics, and no placement
of the camera seemed to alleviate that.
Also it’s in three chunks, the first of them quite long.
In the interests of moving along and catching up on posting videos
of recent meetings, we’re going to leave it like that for now.
Here’s
the agenda.
Here’s a playlist:
Norman Bennett, Tom Call, Roy Copeland chairman, Mary Gooding, Jerry Jennett,
Andrea Schruijer Executive Director, J. Stephen Gupton attorney, Allan Ricketts Project Manager,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 23 February 2012.
Video by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
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The Georgia version, according to GEFA:
As you can see by GEFA’s pie chart, solar energy was too small to chart as a source of energy in Georgia as of 2004. With solar, we can burn less coal and uranium.Net metering is the process whereby an energy consumer produces energy and then sells some or all of this energy to the “grid”, or major energy producers in the state. Under Georgia’s net metering laws, state residents and businesses can purchase and operate green energy capital, including photovoltaics, wind energy and fuel cells, and use this energy on-site. These residents and businesses may then sell any un-used, additional energy produced on-site to their energy provider. There is a maximum of 10 kilowatts (kW) for residential applications and up to 100 kW for commercial applications.
Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has a report, Solar Net Metering in California,
Protecting Net energy metering (NEM) is the top policy priority of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) for California in 2012. NEM is a billing arrangement that allows utility customers to offset some or all of their energy use (up to 1 MW) with selfgenerated renewable energy.The definition sounds the same, except for the cap: 1 megawatt is 1000 kilowatts, so California’s current cap is 100 times the Georgia residential cap and 10 times the Georgia commercial cap, with apparently no distinction between residential and commercial.
The result is this: Continue reading